From Geremie R. Barmé, Shades of Mao:
The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader
(Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), pp. 25-26.
Reproduced with permission of the author.

In death, Mao's body belonged to the nation. Even
from the time of his funeral "Mao as a person, with family and friends,
was displaced by Mao as a transcendent revolutionary leader without a
private domain of his own.101
The memorial hall built to house his preserved body was itself a formalistic
"embodiment" of China built by workers from throughout the country
with materials from every province,102
the last example of what has been called Mao's "participatory democracy."103
The Lincoln-like statue of Mao in the entrance chamber of the Memorial
Hall has behind it a massive picture of the rivers and mountains of China
and in much writing about the dead leader his physical being and spirit
have been equated with the landscape of the nation, and in many cases
Mao's personal revolutionary history drained places of their own history
and made them part of his own. During the new Mao Cult it was claimed
that some tourist spots bore a physical likeness to the Chairman. There
was, for example, the "Sun Peak" in Huizhou, Guangdong, which
was said to look just like a Mao statue104
and at "Mao Zedong Mountain" in Xinjiang the dead leader was
regarded as having been "transubstantiated as a geographical feature
of the national landscape."105
The "geospiritual remerging" of the Leader with the Land reflected
traditional ideas of ancestral return106
and helped regional travel agencies exploit local geography so they could
cash in on the new Cult and China's boom in tourism.

Mao's own corpse, on the other hand, was nothing less than "the biological
structure of an historical monument," to use an expression favoured
by Professor Yuri Denisov, Director of the Institute of Biological Structures
in Moscow, the organization entrusted with the preservation of Lenin's
body and the embalming of other socialist potentates.107
Although plans to dispose of Mao's body and remove the Memorial Hall were
mooted during the de-Maoification process of 1979-80, the Chairman remained
in situ and from the late 1980s his body was often reproduced both
in living tissue and in effigy for popular entertainment. The actors Gu
Yue and Wang Ying, for example, played Mao in numerous big-budget historical
films and multi-episode teleseries which were made before and during the
centenary year of 1993.108
In 1994, a wax effigy of the Chairman was modelled for public display
in the Great Chinese Wax Works located in the Chinese Museum of Revolutionary
History on the eastern flank of Tiananmen Square. As one commentator remarked
upon seeing the lifelike icon of Mao: "He is the banner of the country,
the soul of the people as well as being a Great Man. You enter and empower
yourself with some of the energy of this Giant; when you leave you can
be a more dignified and upstanding Chinese!"109

It is as an incorporeal presence, however, that Mao's influence reached
beyond the grave. As Hua Guofeng, the transient Chairman who succeeded
Mao (and attempted for a time to both look and write like him), said in
his speech at the opening ceremony of the Mao Memorial Hall in September
1977: "Chairman Mao will always be with us; he will always be in
the hearts of each comrade and friend among us; he will always live in
the hearts of the Chinese people and of revolutionary people the world
over."110

NOTES

101.
See Frederic Wakeman, Jr., "Mao's Remains," in James L. Watson
and Evelyn S. Rawski, eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern
China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, p. 263.102. Wakeman, "Mao's
Remains," p. 281; and, A.P. Cheater, "Death Ritual as Political
Trickster in the People's Republic of China," Australian Journal
of Chinese Affairs, issue 26, July 1991, pp. 85-94.103. See David E. Apter
& Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic, Cambridge,
Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 313.104. Cai Yongmei, "Maorede
shangpinhua," Kaifang zazhi, 1993: 11, pp. 63-64.105. Ann Anagnost, "The
Nationscape: Movement in the Field of Vision," Positions,
vol. 1, no. 3 (Winter 1993), p. 601 & n. 31.106. See Mark Elvin, "Tales
of Shen and Xin: Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China during
the Last 150 Years," in Thomas P. Kasulis, ed., with Roger T. Ames
and Wimal Dissanayake, Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice,
New York: State University of New York Press, 1993, p. 259. By having
his ashes scattered after his death, Zhou Enlai achieved a "geospiritual
return" with greater effect. Zhou was the first leader whose ashes
were scattered after being cremated at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Crematorium
and Columbarium. His cremation is also noted for being the longest (3
hrs) and producing the finest-quality ash. For these details, see Li Weihai,
Weiren shenhoushi--Babaoshan geming gongmu jishi, Taiyuan: Shanxi
renmin chubanshe, 1993, pp. 266-267. 107. See Simon Sebag Montefiore,
"History in a Pickle," The Sunday Times, reprinted in
The Australian, The Weekend Review, April 15-16, 1995, p. 5. For
details of the preservation of Mao's remains, see also Zhisui Li, The
Private Life of Chairman Mao, pp. 16-25; and, Lincoln Kaye, "Mummy
Dearest: The expensive art of preserving a great leader," Far
Eastern Economic Review, 1 September, 1994, p. 17.108. For details, see "Multi-Media
Mao" below.109. See "Suzao weiren,"
Beijing qingnian bao, 30 September, 1994, p. 4. This was not the
first waxwork of Mao made for display in Tiananmen. See Zhisui Li, The
Private Life of Chairman Mao, pp. 23-24.110. Quoted in Wakeman,
"Mao's Remains," p. 284.